July 8, 2012

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Danielewski

705 pages, Doubleday

Review by Marc Nash

Right, where to start unpicking this...
Johnny Truant finds the incomplete notes by an old man called Zampano when the
latter dies and these notes are a critical exegesis of a documentary film
called "The Navidson Record" made by photo journalist Will Navidson
about his strangely mutating house. Only the film never existed and Zampano,
whose notes deconstruct light, space, colour, architecture, (archi-)texture and
psycho-geography amongst other things, is blind, so he never could have viewed
with his own eyes this film that doesn't exist anyway... With me so far?

So apart from being a book about fictions
within fictions, it is also a meta-fiction in the presentation of its text.
Much of the meaning is drip fed through the copious footnotes, themselves
quoting books which may or may not exist in actuality. I saw an old Tutor from
my college referenced there, but I have no idea if the book attributed to him
is real or not. Then there is the layout of part of the text itself. It shape-shifts
much like the interior space of Navidson's house itself. I read this book on my
commute to and from work. The constant need to turn the book on its side or
upside down in order to read certain parts, demanded that I have a seat, not
always a given on the London Underground. There are pages with one line or word
on them, mirror writing, redacted passages, words as architectural features and
so on and so forth.

Okay, so what is the book actually about?
Well, passing over the oddity of whether the documentary film at its heart was
real (within the fictional world of the book at least) or not, Navidson has
bought the house to make up for time spent away from his family on his photo
assignments around the world's hotspots. The house is supposed to be a domestic
idyll to bring them closer together. So its nightmarish qualities mirror the
dissonances within his family in the first place and then exacerbates them by
feeding his obsessive nature as he determines to pin down its strange abilities
to defy the laws of physics. His obsession that takes him inside the dark
expanse of the house and yet further away from his wife and kids. His obsession
is mirrored by that of secondary editor Johnny Truant himself as in his
everyday life, increasingly dominated by the task of putting Zampano's plethora
of notes together into a coherence, starts to suffer similar hallucinations of
space being warped.

Apart from metaphysical musings as to what
the almost infinite expanse of space within the house represents, God, the
abyss or - the book really is a twin study of the two characters Truant and
Navidson. Almost without noticing, you are taken back into their own
childhoods, both unloved and neglected; Truant is taken into care homes as the
appendix of the book reveals the litany of letters from his hospitalised
paranoid-schizophrenic mother, while we learn much about Navidson's upbringing
through the reconciliation with his twin brother Tom who he summons to help him
solve the riddle of the house.

There is much mastery to appreciate and
acknowledge in the book. These two character studies actually turn out to be
very affecting each in their own way. The tracing of the relationship between
Navidson and his increasingly desperate ex-model wife Karen who cannot bear his
withdrawals from her into his obsessions is expertly portrayed. However I can't
help feeling that these character studies are overwhelmed and buried behind all
the tricks and artifices that the book also practises. On the one hand I relish
the non-linearity of Daneilewski's narrative, in order perhaps to try and
unlock the complexities of human psyches, yet its very artificiality cuts
against this, I feel. It is a stimulating read, but you have to be in it for
the long haul, so that I couldn't recommend it unreservedly, in case the reader
isn't prepared to make so much investment of themselves in it. It's good, I'm
glad I read it, but am unsure as to the reward in doing so. The artifice kept
me just ever so slightly on the outside of everything.

"Zampano knew from the get go that
what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the
same". Like I say, that kept me, the reader, on the outside instead of
inviting me into the House of Leaves.